The Stream Of The World

Christopher Columbusand the New World of His Discovery

The Stream Of The World

 A man standing on the sea-shore is perhaps as ancient and as primitive a symbol of

wonder as the mind can conceive. Beneath his feet are the stones and grasses of an

element that is his own, natural to him, in some degree belonging to him, at any rate

accepted by him. He has place and condition there. Above him arches a world of

immense void, fleecy sailing clouds, infinite clear blueness, shapes that change and

dissolve; his day comes out of it, his source of light and warmth marches across it, night

falls from it; showers and dews also, and the quiet influence of stars. Strange that

impalpable element must be, and for ever unattainable by him; yet with its gifts of sun

and shower, its furniture of winged life that inhabits also on the friendly soil, it has links

and partnerships with life as he knows it and is a complement of earthly conditions. But

at his feet there lies the fringe of another element, another condition, of a vaster and more

simple unity than earth or air, which the primitive man of our picture knows to be not his

at all. It is fluent and unstable, yet to be touched and felt; it rises and falls, moves and

frets about his very feet, as though it had a life and entity of its own, and was engaged

upon some mysterious business. Unlike the silent earth and the dreaming clouds it has a

voice that fills his world and, now low, now loud, echoes throughout his waking and

sleeping life. Earth with her sprouting fruits behind and beneath him; sky, and larks

singing, above him; before him, an eternal alien, the sea: he stands there upon the shore,

arrested, wondering. He lives,—this man of our figure; he proceeds, as all must proceed,

with the task and burden of life. One by one its miracles are unfolded to him; miracles of

fire and cold, and pain and pleasure; the seizure of love, the terrible magic of

reproduction, the sad miracle of death. He fights and lusts and endures; and, no more

troubled by any wonder, sleeps at last. But throughout the days of his life, in the very act

of his rude existence, this great tumultuous presence of the sea troubles and overbears

him. Sometimes in its bellowing rage it terrifies him, sometimes in its tranquillity it

allures him; but whatever he is doing, grubbing for roots, chipping experimentally with

bones and stones, he has an eye upon it; and in his passage by the shore he pauses, looks,

and wonders. His eye is led from the crumbling snow at his feet, past the clear green of

the shallows, beyond the furrows of the nearer waves, to the calm blue of the distance;

and in his glance there shines again that wonder, as in his breast stirs the vague longing

and unrest that is the life-force of the world.

What is there beyond? It is the eternal question asked by the finite of the infinite, by the

mortal of the immortal; answer to it there is none save in the unending preoccupation of

life and labour. And if this old question was in truth first asked upon the sea-shore, it was

asked most often and with the most painful wonder upon western shores, whence the

journeying sun was seen to go down and quench himself in the sea. The generations that

followed our primitive man grew fast in knowledge, and perhaps for a time wondered the

less as they knew the more; but we may be sure they never ceased to wonder at what

might lie beyond the sea. How much more must they have wondered if they looked west

upon the waters, and saw the sun of each succeeding day sink upon a couch of glory

where they could not follow? All pain aspires to oblivion, all toil to rest, all troubled

discontent with what is present to what is unfamiliar and far away; and no power of

knowledge and scientific fact will ever prevent human unhappiness from reaching out

towards some land of dreams of which the burning brightness of a sea sunset is an image.

Is it very hard to believe, then, that in that yearning towards the miracle of a sun

quenched in sea distance, felt and felt again in human hearts through countless

generations, the westward stream of human activity on this planet had its rise? Is it

unreasonable to picture, on an earth spinning eastward, a treadmill rush of feet to follow

the sinking light? The history of man's life in this world does not, at any rate, contradict

us. Wisdom, discovery, art, commerce, science, civilisation have all moved west across

our world; have all in their cycles followed the sun; have all, in their day of power, risen

in the East and set in the West.